Thursday December 6, 2018

What do space capsules, submarines, and office buildings have in common? Each was conceived as a closed system: a self-sustaining physical environment demarcated from its surroundings by a boundary that does not allow for the transfer of matter or energy.

The history of twentieth-century architecture, design, and engineering has been strongly linked to the conceptualization and production of closed systems. As partial reconstructions of the world in time and in space, closed systems identify and secure the cycling of materials necessary for the sustenance of life. Contemporary discussions about global warming, recycling, and sustainability have emerged as direct conceptual constructs related to the study and analysis of closed systems.

From the space program to countercultural architectural groups experimenting with autonomous living, The Architecture of Closed Worlds, Or, What is the Power of Shit? (Lars Müller, 2018) documents a disciplinary transformation and the rise of a new environmental consensus in the form of a synthetic naturalism, wherein the laws of nature and metabolism are displaced from the domain of wilderness to the domain of cities and buildings. While these ideas derive from a deeply rooted fantasy of architecture producing nature, The Architecture of Closed Worlds displays their integration into the very fabric of reality in our contemporary cities and buildings.

Manifesto Series: Closed Worlds brings together a panel of architects, building technologists, and historians to discuss the complex and divergent legacies of sustainable design practice as a bodily reality, beyond the statistics of resource management. Participants will be asked to present manifestos that convey counter histories and projected futures of closed systems in order to consider the potential impact of designing environments that simultaneously provide enclosure, sustainability, and sustenance. In order to challenge the established sustainability axiom “cradle to cradle,” one may need to look at shit.

About the Manifesto Series

The Manifesto Series format invites participants to denounce a present or past condition, proclaim an alternative present, past or future situation, and indicate a strategy or method of action.

The Architecture of Closed Worlds, Or, What is the Power of Shit? presents an archive of 37 historical living prototypes from 1928 to the present that put forth an unexplored genealogy of closed resource regeneration systems. Prototypes are presented through unique discursive narratives accompanied by historical images, and each includes new analysis in the form of a feedback drawing that problematizes the language of environmental representation by illustrating loss, derailment, and the production of new substances and atmospheres. Each drawing displays a feedback loop, wherein the human physiology of ingestion and excretion becomes the combustion device of an organizational system envisioned for humans, animals, and other live species. The moments of failure portrayed when closed worlds escape the designed loop cycles raise a series of questions about the ontology of autonomous enclosures.

The book also showcases a timeline of the 37 prototypes, illuminating the ways in which they have contributed to the idea of “net zero” in our contemporary culture of sustainability. The timeline highlights the evolution of total circular resource regeneration, from military research and the experiments of NASA’s space program, to more contemporary manifestations such as the benefits of the housing industry, countercultural practice for autonomous living in the city, nostalgia for the homesteading movement, and ecological tourism and environmental capitalism.

This book examines ecological questions viscerally, via the raw ecology of our bodies and their excrement. It studies recycling not as a statistical problem related to the management of urban resources but as a basic bodily reality affecting the water we consume and the air we breathe. To write a counter-history to the established sustainability axiom “cradle to cradle,” one needs to look at shit. Only through this raw confrontation may the ecology of life be somehow useful. To avoid clichés of sustainability, shit might be our only way out.

This book is supported by the Robert S. Brown ’52 Fellows Program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Elise Jaffe & Jeffrey Brown, and Pentagram Design. It is based on the exhibition Closed Worlds, presented at Storefront’s gallery space in 2016.

Lydia Kallipoliti is an architect, engineer, and scholar whose research focuses on the intersections of architecture, technology, and environmental politics, and more particularly on recycling material experiments as well as theories of waste and reuse. She is an Assistant Professor of Architecture and the Director of the Master of Science Program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She has also taught at Syracuse University, Columbia University (GSAPP), Pratt Institute and the Cooper Union, where she also served as a Senior Associate at the Institute for Sustainable Design and as the Feltman Chair in Lighting.

Her work has been published and exhibited widely including the Venice Biennial, the Istanbul Design Biennial, the Shenzhen Biennial, the Onassis Cultural Center and the Royal Academy of British Architects. Kallipoliti was the founder of EcoRedux, an innovative online open–source educational resource documenting the history of ecological experimentation, for which she received a silver medal in the W3 awards for environmental awareness, an honor at the 14th Webby Awards in Digital Arts and Sciences, the High Meadows Sustainability Fund, and the Lawrence Anderson Award for the creative documentation of architectural history. EcoRedux was also a traveling exhibition (including museums in Athens, New York and the Design Hub in Barcelona) and an issue of Architectural Design magazine (AD) edited by Kallipoliti in 2010.

Recently she authored The History of Ecological Design for Oxford English Encyclopedia of Environmental Science (2018) and the book The Architecture of Closed Worlds, Or, What is the Power of Shit (Lars Muller Publishers/Storefront for Art and Architecture, 2018), based on the exhibition, Closed Worlds, at Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2016, and supported by the Graham Foundation, the New York State Council for the Arts, as well as the ACSA award for creative achievement. Kallipoliti holds a Diploma in Architecture and Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, a Master of Science (SMArchS) in design and building technology from MIT and a PhD in history and theory of architecture from Princeton University.

Participant Bios

Ross Exo Adams is the FRK Faculty Fellow Assistant Professor of Architecture & Urban Theory at Iowa State University. His research looks at the history and politics of urbanization. He has published and presented widely on social and political relations between architecture, urban design, geography, and climate change. His research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Royal Institute of British Architects, The London Consortium, Iowa State University and The MacDowell Colony. He has taught at the Bartlett, the Architectural Association, the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, and the University of Brighton and is the Reviews Editor for The Journal of Architecture. His monograph, Circulation and Urbanization, is forthcoming this winter.

Peder Anker is Associate Professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. His teaching and research interests lie in the history of science, ecology, environmentalism and design, as well as environmental philosophy. He has received research fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the Dibner Institute and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and been a visiting scholar at both Columbia University and University of Oslo. He is the co-author of Global Design: Elsewhere Envisioned (Prestel, 2014) together with Louise Harpman and Mitchell Joachim. He is also the author of From Bauhaus to Eco-House: A History of Ecological Design (Louisiana State University Press 2010), which explores the intersection of architecture and ecological science, and Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895-1945 (Harvard University Press, 2001), which investigates how the promising new science of ecology flourished in the British Empire. Professor Anker’s current book project explores the history of ecological debates in his country of birth, Norway. Peder Anker received his PhD in history of science from Harvard University in 1999.

Anna Dyson teaches design, technology, and theory at the School of Architecture at Rensselaer. She is the director of The Center for Architecture, Science and Ecology (CASE) which hosts the Graduate Program in Architectural Sciences, concentration is Built Ecologies. She has worked as a design architect and product designer in several offices in Canada, Europe, and the United States. Her work has been exhibited in the MoMA Young Architects Series, and was a finalist in the international Next Generation Design Competition. Dyson holds multiple international patents for building systems inventions and is currently directing interdisciplinary research sponsored to develop new systems for on-site energy generation. Dyson received a Baccalauréat Général from Université Laval and a Master of Architecture from Yale University.

Andrés Jaque, Phd Architect (ETSAM), is an Associate Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia GSAPP, where he directs the Master of Science program in Advanced Architectural Design. Jaque is the founder of the Office for Political Innovation, an architectural practice based in New York and Madrid, Spain, and has been teaching advanced design studios at Columbia GSAPP since 2013. His architectural work includes ‘Plasencia Clergy House’, ‘House in Never Never Land’, ‘TUPPER HOME’, ‘ESCARAVOX’ or ‘COSMO, MoMA PS1’. The Office for Political Innovation has been awarded with the SILVER LION to the Best Research Project at the 14th Venice Biennale, the Dionisio Hernández Gil Award, London Design Museum’s Designs of the Year Selection, Mies van der Rohe Award (finalist) and Architectural Record’s Designers of the Year Selection. Their publications include PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society, Different Kinds of Water Pouring into a Swimming Pool, Dulces Arenas Cotidianas or Everyday Politics; and their work has being included in the most important media, including A+U, Bauwelt, Domus, El Croquis, The Architectural Review, Volume or The New York Times; and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art MoMA, London Design Museum, MAK in Vienna, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, RED CAT Cal Arts Contemporary Art Center in Los Angeles, Z33 in Hasselt, Schweizerisches Architektur Museum in Basel, the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine de Paris, the Hellerau Festspielhaus in Dresden, Princeton University SoA.

Anthony Vidler received his professional degree in architecture from Cambridge University in England, and his doctorate in History and Theory from the University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands. Dean Vidler was a member of the Princeton University School of Architecture faculty from 1965–93, serving as the William R. Kenan Jr. Chair of Architecture, the Chair of the Ph.D. Committee, and Director of the Program in European Cultural Studies. In 1993 he took up a position as professor and Chair of the Department of Art History at UCLA, with a joint appointment in the School of Architecture from 1997. Dean Vidler was appointed Acting Dean of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union in 2001, and Dean of the School in 2002. A historian and critic of modern and contemporary architecture, specializing in French architecture from the Enlightenment to the present, he has consistently taught courses in design and history and theory and continues to teach a wide variety of courses at The Cooper Union. He stepped down from the Deanship in 2013. As designer and curator he installed the permanent exhibition of the work of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux in the Royal Salt Works of Arc-et-Senans in Franche-Comté, France, as well as curating the exhibition, Ledoux et les Lumières at Arc-et-Senans for the European year of Enlightenment. In 2004 he was asked to curate the portion of the exhibition Out of the Box dedicated to James Stirling, for the Canadian Center of Architecture, Montreal, and in 2010 installed the exhibition Notes from the Archive: James Frazer Stirling, in the Yale Centre for British Art, an exhibition that then travelled to the Tate Britain and the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart in 2011. His publications include The Writing of the Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment (Princeton Architectural Press, 1987), The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (MIT Press, 1992), Warped Space: Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture (MIT Press, 2000), James Frazer Stirling: Notes from the Archive (Yale University Press, 2010), and The Scenes of the Street and other Essays (Monacelli Press, 2011). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and received the architecture award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2011.

Mark Wigley is Professor and Dean Emeritus at Columbia GSAPP. He served as Dean from 2004 to 2014. Wigley has written extensively on the theory and practice of architecture and is the author of Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (1998); White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (1995); and The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (1993). He co-edited The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationalist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond (2001). In 2005 he co-founded Volume magazine with Rem Koolhaas and Ole Bouman as a collaborative project by Archis (Amsterdam), AMO (Rotterdam), and C-lab (Columbia University). Wigley curated the exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture at The Museum of Modern Art, and others at The Drawing Center, New York; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; and Witte de With Museum, Rotterdam. Mark Wigley was awarded the Resident Fellowship, Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism (1989), International Committee of Architectural Critics (C.I.C.A.) Triennial Award for Architectural Criticism (1990) and a Graham Foundation Gran (1997). He received both his Bachelor of Architecture (1979) and his Ph.D. (1987) from the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

What does it mean to design for multiple species? When we do not, are we committing unknown crimes?

Increasingly, architects, biologists, designers, and technologists are working to produce more bio-receptive and symbiotic environments—but not without some tumultuous stories. Interrogation Series: Across Scales and Species brings together these experts and others to reveal the effects of the built environment and microbiological ecologies on genetic landscapes, from urban spaces to our bodies. In the form of a deposition, participants will answer a series of questions that serve to interrogate our current understandings of design amidst potentially delinquent and entirely human-centered design practices.

In 2010, a 50-year-old maraschino cherry factory in Red Hook, Brooklyn developed a colorful problem: bees across the city were producing red honey, attracting all sorts of attention. Fast forward five years, and the story grew to include the Brooklyn District Attorney, the Department of Environmental Conservation, a 2500 square foot marijuana growhouse, and a suicide. It played out amidst parallel concerns around food safety, insect health, and industrial runoff in a strange biocriminal saga that reaffirmed our collective indebtedness to bees.

Drawing on the latent detective prowess of bees, a team of experts from MIT, NYU, Cornell, and The Cooper Union came together to install hives around the city in 2015 as part of a project called Holobiont Urbanism. The apiaries positioned bees as metagenomic sensors that could collect data about the microbial communities found within their flight ranges. This burgeoning field of research reveals origins, actions, and destinations of humans and animals in neighborhoods around the city, shedding light upon entirely new species and ecosystems as well as methods for fighting pollutants present in the air and water.

Storefront’s current exhibition, Subculture: Microbial Metrics and the Multi-Species City questions the common perceptions of our interactions with the microscopic world, providing insight into the future of design, from data science to material science. It proposes future-oriented practices of data collection and interpretation that can produce new modes of environmental perception.

Prior to Interrogation Series: Across Scales and Species, Dr. Elizabeth Hénaff will lead the first of two workshops entitled Bioinformatics for Environmental Metagenomics. To read more about the workshop, see HERE.

About the Interrogation Series

The Interrogation Series employs the format of an interview, deposition, or Q&A to evince and implicate emerging modes of thought within institutionalized practices. With the presumption that a crime (a book, building, photograph, thought…) has been perpetrated, a dialogical exchange documents a testimony with an open-ended verdict, be it confession, indictment, or exoneration.

About the Participants

Ariane Lourie Harrison is an architect, educator, and co-founder of Harrison Atelier. Ariane has taught at the Yale School of Architecture since 2006, in the graduate and undergraduate studio and design sequences and in the graduate history/theory sequence. She is also currently teaching at Pratt Institute GAUD in the MS Arch program. She is the editor of Architectural Theories of the Environment: Posthuman Territory (Routledge, 2013). Ariane worked at Eisenmann Architects (May 2006 through August 2008). She is the editor of Ten Canonical Buildings by Peter Eisenmann (Rizzoli, 2008). Ariane received her Ph.D in architectural history from the Institute of Fine Arts NYU with a thesis titled, “Mass-Produced Aura: Thonet and the Market for Modern Design, 1930-1953″. She received her M.Arch from Columbia University and an AB, summa, in architectural history from Princeton University. She is a LEED AP and registered architect in the state of New York.

Dr. Elizabeth Hénaff is a computational biologist and assistant professor at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. At the center of her research is a fascination with the way living beings interact with their environment. She has made contributions to understanding how plants respond to the force of gravity, how genome structure changes in response to stress, and most recently has turned her attention to the ubiquitous and invisible microbial component of our environment. This inquiry has produced a body of work that ranges from scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals, to projects with landscape architects, to working as an artist in environments from SVA to the MIT Media Lab. She teaches courses in BioDesign in the Integrated Digital Media department at NYU Tandon.

The Living (led by David Benjamin) is a design studio and an experiment in living architecture. Its work focuses on expanding the definition of environmental sustainability through the frameworks of biology, computation, and a circular economy. The studio has won design awards from the American Institute of Architects, the Architectural League, the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize, the Museum of Modern Art, Ars Electronica, the German Federal Government, and Holcim Foundation. Recent projects include the Embodied Computation Lab (a new building for research on sensors and robotics) and Hy-Fi (a branching tower made of a new type of biodegradable brick). A monograph about the studio, Now We See Now: Architecture and Research by The Living, will be published by The Monacelli Press in Fall 2018. The studio team is: David Benjamin (Founding Principal), John Locke, Danil Nagy, Damon Lay, Dale Zhao, Jim Stoddart, Ray Wang, and Lorenzo Villaggi.

Kevin Slavin was the Founding Chief Science and Technology Officer for The Shed as well as the Founder of the Playful Systems group at MIT’s Media Lab, where he retains a Research Affiliate title. As an entrepreneur, he has founded and co-founded several companies, including Area/Code, one of the earliest pioneers of geolocative gaming, acquired to become the New York office of Zynga in 2011. He is one of the founding editors and is on the Editorial Board of the MIT Press Journal of Design and Science, and is on the board of The Cooper Union, where he was Vice-Chair between 2014 and 2016. He co-developed the Urban Computing class at NYU’s ITP. and has taught at ITP, Cooper Union, MIT, and Fabrica, among others.

Tuesday May 22, 2018

97 Kenmare Street

Roberto Burle Marx, Praça dos Cristais (Crystal Plaza), Brasília, 1972. A thirty-acre triangular plaza, envisioned as a vast military parade ground, was commissioned by the Brazilian military regime for the Ministry of the Army in 1970. Oscar Niemeyer’s Quartel-General do Exército (Brazilian Army General Headquarters) is seen beyond. Source: Arquivo Público do Distrito Federal

Reading Images Series: Depositions looks into Brazilian architect Roberto Burle Marx’s eighteen environmental depositions, a series of position pieces written and delivered to the Federal Council of Culture, a plenary convened by the Brazilian military dictatorship in 1967. Burle Marx’s seven-year tenure on the council, from 1967 through 1974, was a period that included the regime’s most oppressive years.

Catherine Seavitt’s recently released book, Depositions: Roberto Burle Marx and Public Landscapes Under Dictatorship, includes the first English translations of these depositions, addressing such issues as deforestation, national parks and land conservation, urban disfiguration, botanical gardens, ecological devastation, and the unique qualities of the Brazilian landscape. The speeches articulate an opposition to the regime’s strategy of national economic development. Yet the complexity of the historical and political context cannot be overlooked – Burle Marx was a voluntary cultural advisor to a regime that would execute a series of brutal human rights violations as well as devastating environmental abuses in the interest of national economic development.

Reading Images Series: Depositions invites experts in fields that touch upon environmental issues, from landscape architecture to preservation and policy, to examine the conflicting agency of undertaking environmental advocacy work while operating under restrictive, and often oppressive, regimes.

Copies of Depositions: Roberto Burle Marx and Public Landscapes Under Dictatorship will be for sale during the event.

About the Reading Images SeriesThe Reading Images Series format invites participants to closely look into images and construct arguments, narratives and observations that produce incisive readings of form, politics, gaze, and representation.

About the Participants

Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, ASLA, AIA, is an associate professor of landscape architecture at City College of New York and principal of Catherine Seavitt Studio. Her research explores adaptation to climate change in urban environments and the novel transformation of landscape restoration practices. She is also interested in the intersection of political power, environmental activism, and public health, particularly as seen through the design of public space and policy. Her work has been published in Artforum, Avery Review, Harvard Design Magazine, JoLA, LA+, Landscape Architecture Magazine, Praxis, and Topos. Recent books include Structures of Coastal Resilience (Island Press, 2018) and Depositions: Roberto Burle Marx and Public Landscapes under Dictatorship (University of Texas Press, 2018).

@cseavitt

Laura Belik is a PhD Student in Architecture- History, Theory and Society at UC Berkeley. Laura holds an MA in Design Studies from Parsons- The New School (New York) and a BA in Architecture and Urban Planning from Escola da Cidade (São Paulo- Brazil). Her main research interests are urbanism, politics of space, urban democracy and Latin America. Laura’s current work is related to the urban and constructed environment and its influence in social and political life, dealing with issues of land distribution, migration, isolation and spatial inequality.

Caitlin Blanchfield is a PhD candidate in architectural history and comparative literature and society at Columbia University and a contributing editor to the Avery Review. Her work investigates issues of territoriality, infrastructure, and sovereignty.

Jaffer Kolb is a designer based in New York and co-founder of the award-winning architectural practice New Affiliates. He oftentimes writes–about ideologies of form, queer landscapes and alternative economies–and sometimes curates–currently as a co-director of the Brooklyn-based gallery 1.5 Rooms. He was the 2015 Muschenheim Fellow at the University of Michigan, and before that worked as a designer in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. His work has appeared in numerous exhibitions and has been published internationally.

Annie Phaosawasdi joined Hargreaves Associates in 2011. Prior to Hargreaves Associates she was a landscape architect at Balmori Associates in New York City. She is a registered landscape architect with a wide range of project experience, from master plans to construction documentation. She was the project landscape architect for Zaryadye Park, a 32- acre park in Moscow, Russia and University of California Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive with Diller Scofidio + Renfro; Penn’s Landing Redevelopment for the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation in Philadelphia; and Jamaica Bay Parkland Visions Plan, an Ecological Visions Plan for the 10,000 acres parkland on New York harbor jointly owned by National Parks Service and the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation. She is currently the project landscape architect for the Central Access Philadelphia Project, an 12-acre park that will cross the I-95 and Columbus Boulevard to connect with the banks of the Delaware River, with Pennsylvania Department of Transportation; Carpenter Park, a 9-acre park in Dallas, Texas; and multiple projects with NYC Department of Parks and Recreation.

Frank Ruchala Jr. is the Deputy Director for Zoning at the NYC Department of City Planning. He has been overseeing the implementation of zoning changes identified in the Housing New York plan for affordable housing, as well as other administration priorities. He previously worked in the agency’s Manhattan Office where he was responsible for projects in Midtown Manhattan and Hudson Yards. He has taught in urban design studios at Columbia University and his independent research on oil and suburban development have been exhibited and published internationally. Frank holds masters degrees in urban planning and architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and a bachelor in urban studies from Rutgers University.

Frederick Steiner is dean and Paley Professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, He served for 15 years as dean of the School of Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin, having taught at Arizona State University, Washington State University, the University of Colorado at Denver, and Tsinghua University. Dean Steiner was a Fulbright-Hays scholar at Wageningen University and a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. A fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, he has written, edited, or co-edited 18 books, including Making Plans (UT Press, 2018).

About the Book:

Catherine Seavitt Nordenson’s new book Depositions: Roberto Burle Marx and Public Landscapes under Dictatorship (University of Texas Press, 2018) explores a pivotal moment in the preeminent modernist landscape architect’s career—the years in which he served as an appointed member of the Federal Cultural Council in Brazil, an advisory panel created by the military dictatorship in the mid-1960s. Burle Marx’s consular speeches notably critique the nationalist developmental policies of the military regime and advance his position as an ecological activist. The first English translation of Burle Marx’s eighteen environmental position pieces, Seavitt Nordenson contextualizes the depositions by analyzing their political and cultural contexts, as well as by presenting pertinent examples of Burle Marx’s public projects in Brazil—several commissioned by the military regime itself. Despite the inherent conflict and risk in working with the military regime, Bure Marx boldly used his position to advocate for the protection of the unique Brazilian landscape, becoming a prophetic voice of caution against the regime’s policies of desenvolvimento and resource exploitation. These eighteen engaging position pieces address deforestation, the establishment of national parks, the place of commemorative sculpture and monuments, and the unique history of the Brazilian cultural landscape—a timely set of documents given the current political milieu.

Richly illustrated, the book includes over 180 images drawn from dozens of archives in Brazil, Venezuela, New York, Berlin, and Paris. The book establishes the lineage of the construction of culture by the state in Brazil from the arrival of the Portuguese king João VI to Rio de Janeiro in 1808 through the coup that established the military dictatorship in 1964. João VI’s son Pedro I claimed Brazilian independence from Portugal in 1822, declaring himself Emperor. He abdicated in 1831, returning to Portugal and leaving his young son Pedro II as the last Emperor—he would rule until 1889, devoting himself to the support of culture, education, science, and the natural world, building the values and institutions of the future nation-state. Pedro II’s patronage of the French hydraulic engineer and botanist August Glaziou, the designer of significant imperial and public parks, plazas, and streetscapes in the picturesque style from the 1860s through the 1880s, was a significant influence on Burle Marx’s work in the twentieth-century. Burle Marx explored the themes of ecology and biodiversity throughout his professional life. He would also remain close to those in political power, collaborating with an impressive roster of modern architects and accepting commissions from powerful members of the Brazilian political elite—including those connected to the Getúlio Vargas Estado Novo dictatorship from 1937-1945 and the military regime of 1964-1989. Throughout the book, the images support Burle Marx’s positioning of nature, environmental conservation, and ecology as part of the cultural expression of a modern Brazil—while addressing the ethical questions and political motivations of his role as advisor to the military regime.

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Support

Storefront’s programming is made possible through general support from Arup; DS+R; F.J. Sciame Construction Co., Inc.; Gaggenau; Knippers Helbig; KPF; MADWORKSHOP; ODA; Rockwell Group; Tishman Speyer; the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; The Greenwich Collection Ltd.; the Lily Auchincloss Foundation; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; The Peter T. Joseph Foundation; and by Storefront’s Board of Directors, members, and individual donors.

On the closing day of Sex and the So-Called City, Storefront presents THE BIG DISCUSSION, a deliberation over the two-decade urban legacy of HBO’s Sex and the City and the ways in which it heralded and prescribed the evolution of New York City. Responding to the show’s episodic urban scenarios, the day-long summit convenes experts and activists to share overlapping stories of how LLC shell companies, waste management procedures, gay porn, and mineral rights efforts reshaped the city.

The event, curated and hosted by Andrés Jaque and the Office for Political Innovation, invites the public to promiscuously engage with speakers in order to mobilize alternative narratives of sex, capital, real-estate, bodies, natural resources, and ecosystems, and the ways that these elements assemble and interact with each other in New York City’s transurban expansion.

Schedule

1:00 pm: Andrés Jaque, Office for Political Innovation – Sex and the So-Called City

Michael J. Bullock is a writer, journalist and publisher that lives in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. He started his career in publishing at the grandfather of the modern independent magazine index (from 2000-2004) and went on to set up BUTT (the revolutionary dutch homosexual magazine) in America, becoming it’s US publisher (2003 – 2011). Currently he is the American features editor for the contemporary interiors magazine Apartamento, a regular contributor to the architecture and design title PIN–UP, and works on the publishing side of Fantastic Man, The Gentlewoman, and PIN–UP . In addition he is on the board of directors of Downtown for Democracy a political action committee that he co-founded in 2003 that uses the talent and skill of the creative community to raise money and develop communication materials for progressive candidates. In 2013, Karma published his novella Roman Catholic Jacuzzi.

Instagram: @michaeljbullock

Cristobal Correa moved to New York in 1998 and helped found BuroHappold’s New York office. In his 30 year engineering career Cristobal has designed tension structures, facades, art installations, long span structures, and temporary buildings as well as more traditional buildings of concrete and steel. He enjoys working collaboratively with architects and exploring with them the ever-changing challenges of building!

Years ago, Cristobal was seduced by a master planning exercise and so began his life-long love of cities and their infrastructure. He currently serves on the board of Open House New York and is the Director of Technology at the Graduate Architecture and Urban Design School at Pratt Institute where he teaches. He enjoys living in New York City!

Colin Curley is a landscape and architectural designer at James Corner Field Operations, and a researcher and production coordinator for LA+ Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture. His design research explores the alternative aesthetic and experiential potential of hyper-toxic, denatured landscapes, while operating within the broad spectrum of their social, political, regulatory, and ecological complexities. Colin holds a Master of Landscape Architecture and Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, where he was named a University Olmsted Scholar and awarded the Ian L. McHarg Prize, and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Virginia.

Instagram: @see_p_see, @laplusjournal

Facebook: /LAPlusJournal

Twitter: @laplusjournal

Lydia Kallipoliti is an architect, engineer and scholar. She is an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Director of the Geofutures M.S. Architecture Program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and Professor and Senior Research Associate at the Center for Architecture, Science and Ecology (CASE) in New York.

Prior to her current position at RPI, Kallipoliti taught at Columbia GSAPP, the Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, and Syracuse University. She holds a Diploma in Architecture and Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, a SMArchS in building technology from MIT and a PhD in history and theory of architecture from Princeton University. Her research focuses on the intersections of architecture, technology, and environmental politics and more particularly on recycling material experiments, theories of waste and reuse, as well as closed and self-reliant systems and urban environments. She is the author of Closed Worlds, Or, What is the Power of Shit for which she has received the ACSA award for Creative Achievement. She is also the founder of EcoRedux, an innovative online research platform, and ANAcycle thinktank, a design, research and writing practice based in Brooklyn, NY.

Jake Jaxson is the CEO of CockyBoys, a New York based gay adult entertainment company. Jaxson has produced numerous award-winning documentaries, TV shows, and independent films, highlighted by an Emmy Award for TRIBEtv. Jaxson’s work is dedicated to the healthy and creative exploration of gay sex! His life and work have been featured in New York Magazine, The Village Voice, OUT, Cosmopolitan, Elle, DNA, Salon, Paper, and Huffington Post.

Instagram: @JakeJaxson

Facebook: /JakeJaxson

Twitter: @cockyboys

Matthew Ransom is an architect and researcher based in New York City. His work is largely focused on uncovering the many ways in which architecture manifests itself, and in the politics of representation. This interest has led to work with organizations such as Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs and the Columbia University GSAPP Incubator at the New Museum, where his research with A-Frame, a collective practice formed in the studios at Columbia, uses natural language processing to parse the ways architecture is communicated. He has worked both in New York and Paris, and is currently the design director of Overhead, an architecture office founded in 2018.

Instagram: @matthewransom

Vera Scroggins

I am presently 67 years old and retired from Nurses’ Aide Work and am a mother of three, adult children and grandmother of two. I moved to rural, Susquehanna County, Pa., in 1991 from Long Island, NY, Nassau County and living here now for 27 years. I came to escape pollution and industrial development and wanted a rural area, low traffic, clean air and clean water. Seventeen years later in 2008, I was shown a gas-drilling rig on a farm near me in my county and was shocked and dismayed and decided to document all I could of this and learn all I could about it. I’ve been documenting with videos on my youtube channel under my name of Vera Scroggins and have about 800 videos showing what I experienced and viewed in my county and elsewhere; I’ve given many testimonies to groups and to government agencies to show the risks, impacts, harms to my county of having gas development industrialization next to homes, schools, and on farms. I also started giving Citizen Gas Tours to show all this to interested parties who contacted me since 2009 and have given hundreds of Tours to people from all over USA and from five continents. We have seven or more gas companies in my county developing, besides pipeline companies and gas compressor station companies. In 2013, Cabot Oil and Gas took me to Court to allege repeated trespassing on their leased properties and asked for and received an Injunction to keep me away from their sites and lease roads. I am now under a Permanent Injunction and must stay 100’ from their developed sites, 25’ from their leased roads which are off public roads, and park 100’ away from their leased road entrances or be charged with contempt of court. Since Injunction, I’ve been charged with contempt and received fine of 1,000 and am presently in court for contempt again this year and also criminal trespass charges and disorderly conduct charges. I deny intentionally trespassing or any disorderly conduct. I’ve had several civil rights attorneys represent me along the way and now I’m on my own and pro se and representing myself. Cabot Oil and Gas is able to exaggerate trespass charges to keep me away and hinder me in my documenting. I was able to go on Cabot sites for 5 years before they decided to pursue an Injunction and now criminal charges. Gas Workers also have lied to the Court about what they see and claim I have done. I still document, videotape, speak out, and give Citizen Gas Tours to show how the Gas Industry has taken over our Country; in my county in Pa., we now have almost 1500 gas wells, over 50 Gas Compressor Stations, hundreds of miles of new, high-pressure, gas pipelines, gas power plants, and waste treatment plant and waste ponds and other parts of this needed infrastructure. There is air pollution from all this, noise pollution, light pollution, water pollution, industrial traffic pollution.

Louise Story

Louise Story, an award winning journalist who spent 12 years at The New York Times. Louise is known for her hard-hitting investigations into international fraud and money laundering. She was a lead reporter on the financial crisis and her recent project on dirty money in real estate led to federal regulatory reform, the DOJ’s largest kleptocracy case ever and to greater public interest in secretive shell companies.

Twitter: @louisestory

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Office for Political Innovation

The Office for Political Innovation, a Madrid/New York based practice directed by Andrés Jaque, develops architectural projects that bring inclusivity into daily life. All of the practice’s architectures can be seen as durable assemblages of the diversity that comprises ordinary life.

The practice received the Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts in 2016 and the Silver Lion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, and has designed award-winning projects such as Plasencia Clergy House (Dionisio Hernández Gil Prize), House in Never Never Land (Mies van der Rohe European Award Finalist), Tupper Home (X Bienal Española de Arquitectura y Urbanismo), and Escaravox (COAM Award 2013). In 2015, Andrés Jaque was the winner of MoMA PS1’s Young Architect Program, with the project Cosmo.

The Office for Political Innovation’s work has instigated crucial debates for contemporary architecture. In 2012, the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA) acquired the project IKEA Disobedients as the first architectural performance to be part of its collection. In 2013, the practice presented Superpowers of Ten at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Different Kinds of Water Pouring into a Swimming Pool at RED CAT / CalArts Center for Contemporary Arts in Los Angeles, and Hänsel & Gretel’s Arenas at La Casa Encendida in Madrid. In 2012, the practice unblackboxed Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion with the intervention PHANTOM: Mies as Rendered Society. In 2011, the research and prototype-making project Sweet Parliament Home was presented at the Gwangju Biennale, and in 2010, the installation Fray Home Home was displayed at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennial.

The Office for Political Innovation is the author of the publications PHANTOM: Mies as Rendered Society, Different Kinds of Water Pouring into a Swimming Pool, Dulces Arenas Cotidianas, and Eco-Ordinary: Codes for Everyday Architectural Practices and Everyday Politics. Their work has been published in many key media outlets, including A+U, Domus, El Croquis, the New York Times, and Vogue, among others.

Miguel de Guzmán / Imagen Subliminal

Imagen Subliminal Architectural Photography + Film was founded by architect and architectural photographer Miguel de Guzmán. The firm, comprised of Miguel de Guzman and Rocío Romero, is a New York and Madrid-based practice whose work is commissioned by many internationally renowned architecture, construction, and real estate firms.

Imagen Subliminal’s photographs have been published worldwide in print magazines such as Architect, Dwell, El Croquis, Arquitectura Viva, A+U Japan, Domus, Casabella, Mark, C3, and many other books and newspapers. The practice also collaborates with online media as Archdaily, Dezeen, Designboom, and Divisare.

Imagen Subliminal’s film work has been displayed at MAXXI Rome, Centre Pompidou Paris, and architecture film festivals in New York, Los Angeles, Budapest, Santiago, and Seoul.

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Support

Storefront’s programming is made possible through general support from Arup; DS+R; F.J. Sciame Construction Co., Inc.; Gaggenau; Knippers Helbig; KPF; MADWORKSHOP; ODA; Rockwell Group; Tishman Speyer; the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; The Greenwich Collection Ltd.; the Lily Auchincloss Foundation; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; The Peter T. Joseph Foundation; and by Storefront’s Board of Directors, members, and individual donors.

In architecture, spatial thinking is at the core of the design process. In music, however, space is often considered a surface effect, a veneer of “good” or “bad” acoustics that is applied to sound rather than grounding it. But music is inherently spatial. As it travels from a source to our ears, music is transformed by the air, the surrounding architecture, and the shape of our own bodies. A number of musicians from across time periods, genres, and traditions have acknowledged this gap, and have exploited spatial phenomena to enrich their musical languages.

Listening Series: Playing Spaces is presented in parallel with the launch of How Musicians Think About Space, edited by Curt Gambetta and Joseph Bedford, and produced by architectural designer and acoustician Willem Boning for Attention – The Audio Journal for Architecture, which documents musical experiments with the spatial dynamics of architecture and landscape. Through interviews, musical excerpts, and acoustical examples, How Musicians Think About Space illuminates the role of space in the imagination of composers, performers, and producers.

This first iteration of Storefront’s Listening Series expands on topics from the journal issue, including the physical phenomena of sound, its reproduction and representation, and the design and occupation of acoustical environments. A performance by sound artist Daniel Neumann will set the stage for a panel discussion with historians, architects, musicians, and acousticians about how musicians engage space as a means for invention. Participants will introduce audio excerpts that capture and communicate a spatial phenomenon, followed by a group discussion on the spatial aspects of musical performance.

About the Performance

For Listening Series:Playing Spaces, Daniel Neumann will perform CHANNELS APPLIED #1, an original spatial sound work that responds to the environment of the event, applying the sonic “raw” material of CHANNELS (January 2018), an installation at Fridman Gallery in NYC, to Storefront’s ground floor gallery space and basement. Neumann frequently uses given sonic material as a compositional strategy. In what he calls a “continual concrète practice,” Neumann stages multiple iterations of given material in different sites, systems, and situations, layering, staggering, cutting, and merging sonic traces and imprints. Inspired by the Musique Concrète movement, he proposes that musical composition begins with concrete sounds instead of an abstract idea. But, in contrast to the fixed media compositions of Musique Concrète, Neumann’s pieces do not result in a finished, hermetic work. Rather, each iteration is responsive to its concrete surroundings and different speaker types and systems. The altered sonic material is subsequently re-applied to new listening situations. In this way, Neumann’s performances are temporary concretions that weave different spatio-temporal fragments and layers together.

About the Listening Series

Storefront’s newest event format, the Listening Series, invites close reflection on aural histories, practices, and imaginaries from the real to the virtual. To make the interaction of sound and space legible in new ways, the format examines the ways sound is experienced, how it interacts with the hegemonies of visual media, and the ways in which it mediates perceptions across physical and psychological domains. To transform hearing into listening, the series invites the public to tune their ears to the performance of spaces, voices, instruments, and machines in order to capture, interpret, synthesize, produce, sonify, broadcast, and engage in feedback with information and environments.

About the Participants

Willem Boning is an architectural and acoustical designer at Arup. He works at the intersection of architecture, sound simulation and virtual reality and has pioneered new tools for acoustical analysis, optimization and reverse-engineering. Willem led the design of the Tiara, an innovative outdoor music structure at the Tippet Rise Art Center, and has done acoustical design and consulting for clients including Steinway & Sons, the Frick Collection, the American Museum of Natural History, WeWork, Google and the Archdiocese of New York. Willem received his Masters of Architecture degree from Princeton University, and previously worked with Rem Koolhaas at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam and Hong Kong. Willem has been invited to speak about his work at various institutions and conferences, including RWTH Aachen, Rice University, PUCP Lima and the IoA Auditorium Acoustics Conference, and he writes about music, acoustics and architecture on his blog, www.fromthesoundup.com.

Curt Gambetta is a scholar, architectural designer and editor of Attention audio journal, together with Joseph Bedford. He is a fourth year PhD student in the School of Architecture at Princeton University, and holds a Bachelor’s degree from Vassar College and a Master of Architecture from Rice University. Prior to his studies at Princeton, he was the Peter Reyner Banham Fellow at the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning, a teaching fellow at Woodbury University School of Architecture in Los Angeles and a resident of the Sarai program of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, India. His design and research practice has included a number of public installations, salons and curatorial residencies at Lawndale Art Center in Houston, CEPA Gallery in Buffalo and WUHO Gallery in LA, as well as ongoing research about the architecture and urbanism of waste infrastructure (http://assemblyoftrash.net/).

Anne Guthrie is an acoustician, composer, and French horn player living in San Francisco. She studied music composition and English at the University of Iowa and architectural acoustics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she completed her Ph.D in 2014. She works as an acoustic consultant at Arup in New York City. Her music combines her knowledge of acoustics and contemporary composition/improvisation. While Guthrie’s electronic music focuses on exploiting the natural acoustic phenomena of unique architectural spaces through minimal processing of field recordings, her composition explores the orchestration of non-musical sounds, speech in particular. Guthrie’s French horn playing focuses on electronic processing and extended techniques used in improvisatory settings, as a soloist and with Fraufraulein and Delicate Sen, among others. Further, her acoustics research centers on the use of ambisonics for stage acoustics.

Zev Greenfield is a not-for-profit arts manager, curator and fundraiser with an MBA from Columbia Business School (’05) and over 15 years of progressive global experience across the not-for-profit and arts/entertainment industries. Zev is the Executive Director of the pioneering Brooklyn-based ISSUE Project Room (more information can be found at issueprojectroom.org) and has a long-standing commitment to artists, devising new and inventive programming, plus coordinating critical operating and capital projects, such as the construction of The Orchestra of St.Luke’s DiMenna Center for Classical Music (New York’s first orchestral rehearsal and recording studio). Prior to ISSUE, Zev led the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation, worked with NY-based orchestras on the development of alternate revenue streams and has served a number of US and international arts organizations.

Bobby McElver is a sound designer and composer working with technology, sound, and music in the performing arts. Company member of The Wooster Group 2011-2016. Current associate with Andrew Schneider. Nominated for a 2015 Bessie for Outstanding Sound Design / Original Music. As an expert Ableton Live user, and a Max For Live programmer, he builds new tools and networks to connect sound and visuals for live events. He specializes in interaction between designs, and creates custom systems for theater, dance, and live music. He also freelances as a sound system designer, engineer, consultant, and audio network technician. These technical skills inform and augment his own sound designs for live performance. His creative work includes numerous sound designs and original scores for theater and dance. His designs have been called “Excellent” by the New York Times and “Haunting” by the LA Times.

Daniel Neumann is a Brooklyn-based sound artist, organizer and audio engineer. He holds a master’s degree in media art from the Academy of Visual Art Leipzig and studied electronic music composition. Neumann’s practice engages hybrid installation-performance formats to explore how sound interacts with space and how spaces can be shaped by sound. He thinks of sound as an interdisciplinary field enabled by audio procedures. Neumann’s works have been presented at Pinacoteca Bellas Artes Universidad de Caldas, Loop Barcelona, MoMA PS1, Knockdown Center, Pratt Institute, Eyebeam, Sculpture Center and many other venues. As a curator, he runs an event series in NYC and Berlin (CT::SWaM) that engages in spatial sound works and focused listening. As a sound engineer, Neumann is the acoustic designer of The World Is Sound at the Rubin Museum and head engineer for Blank Forms, Alarm Will Sound, Diamanda Galás and David Guetta. In 2013-16, he was the head engineer for live events at MoMA PS1. See Daniel’s websitehttp://danielneumann.org/ for samples of his work.

Margaret Anne Schedel is a composer and cellist specializing in the creation and performance of ferociously interactive media whose works have been performed throughout the United States and abroad. As an Associate Professor of Music at Stony Brook University she ran SUNY’s first Coursera Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), an introduction to computational arts. Schedel holds a certificate in Deep Listening and is a joint author of Cambridge Press’s Electronic Music. Her research focuses on gesture in music, the sustainability of technology in art, and sonification/gamification of data. In her spare time she curates exhibitions focusing on the intersection of art, science, new media, and sound and runs www.arts.codes, a site celebrating art with computational underpinnings.

Elaine Sisman is the Anne Parsons Bender Professor of Music at Columbia University. Her numerous publications on Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven include the recent articles “Haydn’s Solar Poetics: The Tageszeiten Symphonies and Enlightenment Knowledge” in the Journal of the American Musicological Society and “Music and the Labyrinth of Melancholy” in the Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies. She received the Ph.D. from Princeton University and has taught at the University of Michigan and Harvard University. A member of the Joseph Haydn-Institut (Cologne) and the Mozart-Akademie (Salzburg), she served a term as president of the American Musicological Society, which elected her to Honorary Membership (2011). In 2014 she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Peter Zuspan is a founding principal of the architecture and design studio Bureau V. Bureau V’s recently completed work, National Sawdust, a nonprofit incubator and performance space for new music in Brooklyn, New York, has been described by The New York Times as “the city’s most vital new-music hall,” and has won numerous awards, including Architectural Review’s Culture Award Commended, Architecture Record’s Top 10 Art Centers of the World in 2015, and was nominated for the Mies Crown Hall America’s Prize. In addition to his architectural work, Zuspan is a trained opera singer and musician and has performed in genre-spanning projects in numerous spaces, including Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, the Venice Biennale of Art, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Gwangju Biennale, the Guggenheim Museum, and Brazil’s Inhotim. Zuspan currently sits as the Secretary of the Board of Directors of National Sawdust. He has taught architecture at Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Syracuse University.

About Attention Audio Journal

Attention is an audio journal for architectural culture that uses the medium of sound and spoken word to capture a dimension of architecture otherwise lost in print. By precluding visual media, Attention strikes a distance between the distraction economy of much online media, creating an intimate and reflective space for the in-depth development of ideas and issues. Through interviews, roundtable debates, oral histories, field recordings, the exploration of archival recordings, experimental music and soundscapes, reportage and audio essays, Attention investigates issues of concern to contemporary architectural culture, theory and practice. Attention is edited by Joseph Bedford and Curt Gambetta, with assistance from production consultant Griffin Ofiesh.

Attention is a sister project of The Architecture Exchange www.thearchitectureexchange.com, a platform dedicated to fostering debate and exchange in architectural culture that was founded by Joseph Bedford and Jessica Reynolds. Since 2013, the Architecture Exchange has organized numerous public events and peer-to-peer workshops between architects, theorists and historians, as well as a book series with Bloomsbury Press.

The introductory audio essay illuminates four aspects of sound in physical space—location, size, reverberation and environmental noise—with examples of how composers from across the spectrum of Western art music exploited these phenomena in their music. Acoustician Jürgen Meyer and musicologist Elaine Sisman show how the classical composer Joseph Haydn used space to create musical effects beyond the boundaries of melody, harmony, rhythm and dynamics.

2 – The Sound of Absence

What is music like without the sound of a space? Historian Emily Thompson discusses the aesthetics, technology and politics of spatial absence at the dawn of the recording era while John and Susan Edwards Harvith explain how musicians coped with, adapted to and sometimes thrived in the acoustically dead confines of the recording studio.

3 – Even Better than the Real Thing

In the 1950s, classical record producers were fixated on realism, aspiring to put listeners in the ‘best seat of an acoustically perfect hall.’ Not so for John Culshaw, however, a maverick producer who used new stereophonic technology to produce operas that were more dramatic, more spatially immersive and (so he claimed) more faithful to a composer’s intentions. Sonic highlights from Culshaw’s producing career accompany a reading from his two memoirs, ‘Ring Resounding’ and ‘Putting the Record Straight.’

4 – The Acoustic Orchestrations

The pianist Glenn Gould was dogmatic about his recording setup, placing the microphone as close as possible to his piano to exclude the sound of the surrounding room. That is, until he encountered the music of Alexander Scriabin—Gould felt that no one acoustic could do justice to Scriabin’s mystical musical language, and devised a system of ‘sound cameras’ that could zoom into or zoom out of his piano. Gould’s ambitious ‘Acoustic Orchestrations’ experiment remained unfinished, however, until music professor Paul Théberge discovered it in an archive and brought the project to completion.

5 – Bach, Sax, Space

One day, while practicing the prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite #1, Yasuaki Shimizu accidentally ran his tenor saxophone through a reverb machine. The sound so moved him that he embarked on an odyssey to record each of the six Cello Suites in a different acoustical environment. In this piece, Shimizu takes us into a warehouse, a stone quarry, a mine, a concert hall, a Baroque villa and a Gothic palazzo, showing us how the unique acoustics of each site drew out the emotional nuances of each suite in Bach’s masterwork.

6 – Free Field/Pressure Field/Diffuse Field

Bad acoustics inspired Daniel Neumann to become a composer and sound artist. After struggling to tame echoes, flutter and too much reverberation as a sound engineer at a nightclub in Leipzig, Daniel embraced these and other acoustical peculiarities and made them the focus of his work. In this piece, Neumann talks about how he uses sound to raise awareness of the idiosyncratic sounds of architectural spaces and plays us an iteration of his piece, “Free Field, Diffuse Field, Pressure Field.”

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Attendance and Seating

All Storefronteventsarefree and open to the public. Seating is on a first come, first served basis, with priority seating available for members of Storefront. If you are a member and would like to reserve a seat, contact membership@storefrontnews.org.

Storefront’s programming is made possible through general support from Arup; DS+R; F.J. Sciame Construction Co., Inc.; Gaggenau; Knippers Helbig; KPF; MADWORKSHOP; ODA; Rockwell Group; Tishman Speyer; the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; The Greenwich Collection Ltd.; the Lily Auchincloss Foundation; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; The Peter T. Joseph Foundation; and by Storefront’s Board of Directors, members, and individual donors.

Governments and private corporations have an increasing interest and investment in big data. From social media posts and network usage to urban occupation, every activity produces data to be quantified, analyzed, and optimized in the production of new marketable and optimized forms of citizenship and governance. However, the data that is produced does not necessarily constitute an objective representation of all citizens. While smart-city governance is based upon formal logic and syntax, the question remains: How can big data meaningfully impact people’s lives or even accurately reflect their behavior and experiences?

What effect does computational urbanism and smart city technology have on the identity of a city? How can policies incorporate big data to positively contribute to the social well-being of urban populations?

Productive Disagreement Series: Syntax vs. Agency opens up the discussion about analytical and design biases within contemporary forms of computational governance and city making. What identities, forms of citizenship, and politics are produced within current forms of digital representation and analysis? What kind of agency do this new forms of representation produce? Who is empowered as a result of digitally based forms of civic knowledge? A panel of urban policymakers and analysts, technology theorists, and media arts experts take on the current implications and short-term impacts of digital infrastructure on the construction of the built environment.

This event is presented as part of the Storefront’s exhibition Control Syntax Rio, in collaboration with Habidatum.

About the Productive Disagreement Series:

Each iteration of Storefront’s Productive Disagreement Seriesdevelops conversations between ideologically opposed individuals, teams, or institutions. The events avoid compromise and agreement as a methodology of dialogical exchange, and promote confrontation and dialogue in order to generate a responsive audience, increase participation, and obtain a multiplicity of viewpoints and strategies.

About the Participants

Alexandre Cardeman is the CEO of Centro de Operações Rio (COR), and a technology project manager with more than 30 years of experience in the public sector. Cardeman is directly engaged in the COR project since the first steps of planning, through to its construction and operations implementation. Cardeman is specialized in public policy and smart city technologies.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg is a transdisciplinary artist and educator who is interested in art as research and critical practice. Her controversial biopolitical art practice includes the project Stranger Visions in which she created portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material (hair, cigarette butts, chewed up gum) collected in public places. Her work has been shown internationally at events and venues including the World Economic Forum, Shenzhen Urbanism and Architecture Biennale, the New Museum, the Centre Pompidou and PS1 MOMA. Projects by Dewey-Hagborg have been widely discussed in the media, from the New York Times and the BBC to TED and Wired. She is an Assistant Professor of Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a 2016 Creative Capital award grantee in the area of Emerging Fields.

Habidatum, a group of urban data analysts, will present Rio Semantic Landscapes: Beyond Control Syntax?. The project presents alternative methods of surveillance, collection, and analysis of urban data gleaned from social media usage in Rio to question if ‘smart city’ technologies lead to safer or happier cities, if individual expression may subvert larger systems of control beyond the purview of the state, and how emerging cartographic softwares provide new tools for understanding spatial syntax and the organization of the city.

Alexei Novikov, isPresident of Habidatum and holds a PhD degree in Regional and Urban Studies. He has been research fellow and visiting professor of urban science in American and European universities. Novikov launched two other startups: EA-Ratings and Geograffity. Prior to Habidatum he was a Managing Director at Standard & Poor’s and at Thomson Reuters. He also consulted the World Bank and other international financial organizations on infrastructure finance.

William McCusker is Product Lead & Business Development Director at Habidatum, and leads product strategy, project management, and business development initiatives. Prior to Habidatum, William coordinated the development of The Atlas of Urban Expansion, an online data visualization tool for an initiative involving New York University, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and the United Nations Human Settlements Programme.

Lev Manovich is one the leading theorists of digital culture worldwide, and a pioneer in application of data science for analysis of contemporary culture. He is the author and editor of ten books including Cultural Analytics (forthcoming), Instagram and Contemporary Image, Data Drift, Software Takes Command, Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database, and The Language of New Media. Manovich is a Professor of Computer Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Director of the Cultural Analytics Lab. The lab created projects for MoMA (NYC), New York Public Library, Google, and other organizations. Manovich received an M.A. in Visual Science and Cognitive Psychology at NYU and a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from University of Rochester. Manovich has been working with computer media as an artist, computer animator, designer, and programmer since 1984.

Rodrigo Rosa is currently Visiting Scholar for Columbia University, after eight years working as Special Advisor of the Mayor’s Office of the City of Rio de Janeiro under the administration of former Mayor Eduardo Paes. As part of that administration, Rosa was involved with major transformative projects including the Port Renovation (a large expansion of health care, education, and transportation) and the Rio Resilient City plan. He took part in high level coordination of major international events, such as the World Cup in 2014, the Summer Olympic Games in 2016, the United Nations Conference Rio+20, TED Global, among others.

As Special Advisor of Chairman Eduardo Paes during the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, Rosa executed strategies to largely expand the network, connecting to cities in China and in the developing world. Rosa was intensely engaged in international city diplomacy, advocating the voice of cities on the global stage. Previously, he worked in the public sector as a legislative consultant to the Brazilian Federal Senate, where he worked crafting legislation in Brazilian Congress before joining Rio City Hall. Rodrigo holds a Masters Degree in Economics and environmental management and is a PhD candidate at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro on energy and sustainable planning.

Blake Shaw is a media artist who works at the intersection of video, critical pedagogy, telecommunication technology, and public space intervention. His work involves the construction of situations that facilitate collaborations between activists and artists around experimental media in attempts to instigate political novelty. His works and performances have been exhibited at a wide range of venues, including: The Akademie der Künste Berlin, The National Gallery of Denmark, The Centre for Art on Migration Politics, The Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Qalandyia International, The Media Architecture Biennale, The Museum of the Moving Image, among others. He has won numerous awards for his work, including a Vimeo Award. His works have been featured in a variety of publications including The Atlantic, Huffington Post, The Creators Project and The New York Times.

Mark Wasiuta is Co-Director of the MS degree program Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture at Columbia GSAPP. Over the last decade, as Director of Exhibitions at GSAPP, he has developed a body of research and archival exhibitions that focus on under-examined practices of the postwar period. Recent exhibitions, produced with various collaborators, include “Every Building in Baghdad: The Rifat Chadirji Archives at the Arab Image Foundation,” “Environmental Communications: Contact High,” “Information Fall-Out: Buckminster Fuller’s World Game,” and “Les Levine: Bio-Tech Rehearsals 1967-1973.” His work has appeared at the Graham Foundation, the Istanbul Design Biennial, the Venice Architecture Biennale, Het Nieuwe Instituut, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, and elsewhere. He directs Collecting Architecture Territories, a multi-year research program that analyses global art institutions that have emerged from private collections. Wasiuta is recipient of recent grants from the Asian Cultural Council, the Graham Foundation, and NYSCA.

Support

Storefront’s programming is made possible through general support from Arup; DS+R; F.J. Sciame Construction Co., Inc.; Gaggenau; Knippers Helbig; KPF; MADWORKSHOP; ODA; Rockwell Group; Roger Ferris + Partners; Tishman Speyer; the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; The Greenwich Collection Ltd.; the Lily Auchincloss Foundation; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; The Peter T. Joseph Foundation; and by Storefront’s Board of Directors, members, and individual donors.

Public space is perpetually being lost and found in accordance with constant changes to the social and technical makeup of our lives. We desire public space because we want our shared landscapes and institutions to reflect and respond to the facts governing our lives. We want our spaces to be contemporary—to be present in our time, to value important cultural heritage, and to perceive common threats obscured by scale and technical complexity or by greed and indifference. Part of our civic selves yearns to be not just collective, but connective.

However, therein lies the problem: this swirling mess of connectivity troubles our sense of public and private, on-time and off-time, and inside and outside, changing our orientation toward common sense and common ground.

Cabaret Series: The Public is in Bits and Bubbles presented a series of performances by artists, architects, and cultural producers that explored the changing states of public space in the age of oversharing, overexposure, and post-fact politics.

The event was hosted by Storefront in collaboration with Lucas Freeman, Ann Lui, and Gediminas Urbonas, editors of “Public Space? Lost and Found” (MIT Press, 2017).

About the Book:

Public Space? Lost and Found explores the contemporary evolution of public space from the milieu of design and artistic thinking and practice at the civic scale. It gathers an eclectic cast of practitioners and theorists of the public domain and welcomes all readers interested in how the production of public space plays out (or could play out) under interrelated, accelerating conditions shaping the present, such as ubiquitous computing, climate change, economic austerity, and the rise of various stripes of political extremism and isolationism.

This publications is edited by Lucas Freeman, Ann Lui, and Gediminas Urbonas, and produced by the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT).

About the Cabaret Series:

Each iteration of Storefront’s Cabaret Series develops modes of expression that engage with contemporary discourses, the audience, and the social, political and physical space of Storefront in a playful, and sometimes humorous manner. The events have the aim to produce new modes of communication between speakers, performers and spectators through provocation, seduction and immediacy.

About the Participants

Dennis Adams has produces site-specific installations, in highly visible locations, such as bus shelters and city streets, that focus on the phenomenon of collective amnesia in the late twentieth century. A survey of ten years of site-specific interventions was published in a monograph entitled Dennis Adams: The Architecture of Amnesia (1989) written by Mary Anne Staniszewski. The publication was followed by two mid-career surveys organized by the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen and the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston.

BB (Francisca Benítez and Christina Bueno) is a Deaf/hearing duo performing in American Sign Language. Their work builds on Deaf poetry, political chants, ASL rhyme structures and resistance songs. Recent shows include “Trilingual Choir of Resistance” at El Museo del Barrio and “Flush Trump” at the House of Justice Deaf Club at The Shrine. Composed by Christina Bueno and Francisca Benítez, BB was born in New York City in 2017.

Colby Chamberlain is a Core Lecturer for Art Humanities at Columbia University and a founding editor of Triple Canopy. His scholarship and criticism focuses on intersections of art and other fields of professional practice, in particular the law. His book project, Fluxus Administration, draws on recent media theory to argue that the artist George Maciunas combined experimental aesthetics with bureaucratic procedures, leading to a consequential realignment between the neo-avant- garde and a range of postwar institutions. The recipient of a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, a Helena Rubinstein Fellowship at the Whitney Independent Study Program, and the College Art Association Art Journal Award, he contributes to publications including Art in America, Artforum, Cabinet, and Parkett.

Lucas Freeman is a writer, editor, and programmer with training in political theory and the history of architecture and urbanism. His research and editorial activities involve him in a wide range of events, exhibits, and publications. He has a particular interest in the spatial consequences of political ideas and the rapid, technologically driven shifts in our modes of privacy and publicity. In recent years, Freeman has contributed to several journals including Scapegoat: Landscape, Architecture, Political Economy and the Harvard Design Magazine, and to many book projects in the field of critical artistic research, including the book series Intercalations (K. Verlag, 2015–) and Art in the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2015). He is currently Writer in Residence in MIT’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology.

Marisa Morán Jahn is an artist who founded Studio REV-, a public art + creative media non-profit organization whose key projects include El Bibliobandido (a masked, story-eating bandit), Video Slink Uganda (experimental films slipped or “slinked” onto pirated dvds that circulate in Uganda’s bootleg cinemas), several books about art and politics, and the CareForce, a public art project, film, + mobile studios (the NannyVan and CareForce One) amplifying the voices of America’s fastest growing workforce — caregivers. Jahn’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art Forum, Univision, BBC, CNN; presented at The White House, Museum of Modern Art, worker centers, public spaces; and awarded grants from Creative Capital, Tribeca Film Institute, Sundance, NEA, Rockefeller Foundation, and more. She teaches at MIT and The New School.

Ann Lui is an assistant professor in Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Ann is also a founding partner of Future Firm, a Chicago-based architecture office, which works at the intersection of landscape territories and curatorial experiments. Previously, Ann practiced at SOM Chicago, Ann Beha Architects, and Morphosis Architects. She cofounded Circus for Construction, a mobile exhibition space on the back of a truck, part of Storefront for Art & Architecture’s WorldWide Storefront program and was Associate Curator of HACLab Pittsburgh: Imagining the Modern (Carnegie Museum of Art, 2015–2016). Ann was assistant editor of OfficeUS Atlas (Lars Müller, 2015); co-editor of “Scandalous,” the 43rd issue of Thresholds (MIT SA+P, 2015); and recently contributed to The Avery Review, Journal of Architectural Education, and Drawing Futures (UCL Press, 2016).

Jill Magid is an artist and writer based in New York City. Her practice is deeply interrogative, forging intimate relationships within bureaucratic structures—flirting with, seducing, and subverting authority. By infiltrating and unsettling powerful institutions, she locates unexpected habits and openings within the structures of bureaucracy. Magid has exhibited at the San Francisco Art Institute; Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland; Berkeley Museum of Art, California; Tate Modern, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam; Gagosian Gallery, New York; and the Security and Intelligence Agency of the Netherlands, and currently at MUAC, Mexico City. She has participated in Manifesta and Performa, and in the Liverpool, Bucharest, Singapore, and Gothenburg Biennials, as well as the Oslo Architecture Triennial. Her four books include: Failed States (2012), Becoming Tarden (2010), Lincoln Ocean Victor Eddy (2007), and Once Cycle of Memory in the City of L (2004). Sternberg Press recently published The Proposal inspired by her recent engagements with the archives of Mexican architect Luis Barragán.

Antoni Muntadas addresses the social and political power encoded in contemporary media. His projects engage a range of forms, including photography, video, installation, audio recording, and urban intervention. Since 1971, the year of his first solo show, in Madrid, and the year he moved to New York, Muntadas has been a vibrant contributor to a global critical conversation around structures of power. He is currently Professor of Practice at MIT’s Program in Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT). He has received many honors, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts; awards from Arts Electronica in Linz and Laser d’Or in Locarno; and the Premi Nacional d’Arts Plàstiques de la Generalitat de Catalunya. In 2009 he was awarded the prestigious Premio Velásquez, given by the Spanish government in recognition of the contributions to Spanish and Spanish-American culture.

Alan Ruiz is a visual artist whose work explores the way space is produced as both material and ideology. His architectural interventions have been shown in exhibitions at the Queens Museum, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Wave Hill, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. His writing has been featured in Archinect, TDR, BOMB Magazine, InVisible Culture, and Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. He received an MFA from Yale University and was a 2015 – 2016 fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program. He teaches at Pratt Institute and The New School. Alan is a current artist-in-residence at Abrons Arts Center.

Gediminas Urbonas is director of the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology, associate professor in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Architecture, and co-founder with Nomeda Urbonas of Urbonas Studio, an interdisciplinary research practice that facilitates exchange amongst diverse nodes of knowledge production and artistic practice in pursuit of projects that transform civic spaces and collective imaginaries. Combining new and old media, their work frequently involves collective activities contributing to the cross-disciplinary exchange between several nodes of knowledge production: network and participatory technologies; sensorial media and public space; environmental remediation design and spatial organization; and alternative planning design integration. They also collaborate with experts in different cultural fields to develop practice-based artistic research models that allow participants—including their students—to pursue projects that merge urbanism, new media, social sciences and pedagogy to critically address the transformation of civic space.

Support

Storefront’s programming is made possible through general support from Arup; DS+R; F.J. Sciame Construction Co., Inc.; Gaggenau; Knippers Helbig; KPF; MADWORKSHOP; ODA; Rockwell Group; Roger Ferris + Partners; Tishman Speyer; the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; The Greenwich Collection Ltd.; the Lily Auchincloss Foundation; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; The Peter T. Joseph Foundation; and by Storefront’s Board of Directors, members, and individual donors.

Special support for Cabaret Series: The Public is in Bits and Bubbles was provided by Spain Arts and Culture, Consul General of Spain in New York.

The condition of extremes suggests a tipping point: a moment in which a system shifts from one state to another (often unpredictable) state.

Ulrick Beck, in Risk Society, argues that “being at risk is the way of being and ruling in the world of modernity…global risk is the human condition at the beginning of the twenty-first century.” Until recently, the developed world has largely been successful in displacing the economic, environmental, and political impact of its development to other nations and peoples, or in directing externalities of development toward other groups and stakeholders within their own nations, rendering the risk invisible in its original context.

However, with the financial crisis of 2008 and the increasingly tangible impacts of climate change, complete displacement of risk is no longer possible. When one group or region seemingly achieves stability, another will likely lose it. A key factor in understanding extreme systems is the ability to interpret their relationship to risk. The further we move away from a state of equilibrium, the more volatile the extremes, the more exposed we are to danger and loss, and the more risk we take on.

Manifesto Series: At Extremes discussed how architecture, infrastructure, and technology negotiate limits and operate in conditions of imbalance. Do the risk/reward models prevalent on the trading floors of global financial markets and in speculative real estate projects hold up in disciplines related to design?

How can the entangled relationship between risk and extreme conditions be leveraged in a new and productive model; one that emphasizes speculation as a way to test scenarios, outcomes, and tools? What is the role of design in such contexts? To document? To redress? To mitigate? To capitalize on new opportunities? Does the progressive destabilization of political, social, and environmental conditions render design more relevant, or less so?

Participants were asked to draw upon Bracket Vol 3. At Extremes, edited by Lola Sheppard and Maya Przybylski, to present a manifesto for or against the positive correlation of risk and extreme circumstances as a productive tool for models in architecture.

About the Book:

Bracket is an almanac that highlights emerging critical issues at the juncture of architecture, environment, and digital culture. The series looks at thematics in our age of globalization that are shaping the built environment in unexpected yet radically significant ways.

About the ManifestoSeries:

Each iteration of Storefront’s Manifesto Seriesinvites participants to denounce a present or past condition, proclaim an alternative present, past or future situation, and indicate a strategy or method of action.

About the Participants

Jordan Carver

Jordan H. Carver is a writer, researcher, and educator who writes on space, politics, and culture. He is the author of the upcoming book Spaces of Disappearance: The Architecture of Extraordinary Rendition (Urban Research, 2017). Jordanis a contributing editor to the Avery Review, a core member of Who Builds Your Architecture? and a Henry M. MacCracken Doctoral Fellow in American Studies at New York University.

Janette Kim is an architectural designer, researcher, and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work focuses on design and ecology in relationship to public representation, interest, and debate. Janette is assistant professor of architecture and co-director of the Urban Works Agency at California College of the Arts, founding principal of the design practice All of the Above, and founding editor of ARPA Journal, a digital publication on applied research practices in architecture. Janette was also Assistant Professor at Syracuse University from 2015-2016 and Adjunct Assistant Professor from 2005-2015 at Columbia University, where she directed the Applied Research Practices in Architecture initiative and the Urban Landscape Lab.

Lola Sheppard / Lateral Office

Lola Sheppard is co-founder, together with Mason White, of Lateral Office, a design practice that operates at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. The studio describes its process as a commitment to design as a research vehicle to pose and respond to complex, urgent questions in the built environment, engaging in the wider context and climate of a project– social, ecological, or political. Lateral Office have been pursuing research and design work on the role of architecture in remote regions, particularly the North, for the past seven years.

Lateral’s work has been exhibited and lectured extensively across the USA, Canada and Europe. Lateral Office are the authors of the upcoming book Many Norths: Spatial Practice in a Polar Territory (Actar 2017) and of Pamphlet Architecture 30, COUPLING: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism, published by Princeton Architectural Press (2011). Sheppard and White are also co-editors of the journal Bracket, together with Neeraj Bhatia and Maya Przybylski.

Andy Vann

Andy Vann is an organizer, educator, parent and architect based in Brooklyn. He has taught at City Tech, City College and Columbia GSAPP and is currently working at Paul Castrucci Architect.

Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss

Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss is a research architect producing exhibitions, books, lectures, installations and buildings. He founded NAO for design and co-founded SMS (School of Missing Studies) for urban studies. He researched for Herzog & de Meuron, designed for Richard Gluckman as well as collaborated with Jenny Holzer, Robert Wilson and Marjetica Potrc. He was a swimmer competing within the national junior league of Yugoslavia.

Support

Storefront’s programming is made possible through general support from Arup; DS+R; F.J. Sciame Construction Co., Inc.; Gaggenau; Knippers Helbig; KPF; MADWORKSHOP; ODA; Rockwell Group; Roger Ferris + Partners; Tishman Speyer; the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; The Greenwich Collection Ltd.; the Lily Auchincloss Foundation; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; The Peter T. Joseph Foundation; and by Storefront’s Board of Directors, members, and individual donors.

Laughter, giggles, grins, and smirks – actions that often originate as spontaneous and instinctive expressions of amusement – create a sense of self-awareness. That which we find funny can be genuinely ground-breaking, changing people’s perspectives by signaling common spaces of understanding.

Humor is a subversion of conventions. Seldom the focus in dominant discourses of art, design, and architecture, there is a recurring interest in the explorations of irony, satire, and the grotesque as a means of critique of the status quo. Humor has a unique and particular potency in responding to turbulent political moments. It can deflect anger, serve as therapy in the face of traumatic events, and undermine prevailing ideologies. Can humor also promote new forms of a more optimistic practice, able to overcome anger, yet effective enough to produce change?

Presented during Paranoia Man in a Rat Fink Room, an installation by Freeman & Lowe, Cabaret Series: ha ha ha (The Funny, the Witty, and the Grotesque) invites artists, architects, designers, and curators to explore the intersections between humor, art, and architecture through performance and discussion.

About the Cabaret Series:

Each iteration of Storefront’s Cabaret Seriesdevelops modes of expression that engage with contemporary discourses in a playful and humorous manner. The events have the aim to produce new modes of communication between speakers, performers, and spectators through provocation, seduction, and immediacy.

About the Participants

Beverly Fre$hhas broken several Guinness Book World Records; including breaking the most eggs on his head and compiling the tallest stack of rap tapes. Beverly has exhibited throughout the US and internationally, including China, Japan, Peru, Poland, Ukraine, Czech Republic, France and Germany. Recent exhibitions include, MR MDWST – A REAL GOOD TIME (2015), a solo exhibition at the Cranbrook Museum of Art. He is co-founder of sUPERIORbelly, a record label based in Detroit; cofounder of WILD AMERICAN DOGS; and co-founder of the Archive of Midwestern Culture. He is an Associate Professor and Area Head of Graphic Art at DePaul University in Chicago.

Brian Hubble lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recent exhibitions include MOCA in Los Angeles, Fastnet in Brooklyn, and Less is More Projects in Paris and Brussels. He is the co-director of Unisex Salon, an artist-run contributive platform for voices of the multi-disciplinary community. Hubble completed his MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was the recipient of the William Merchant R. French Fellowship.

WH Vivian Lee is the co-founder of LAMAS, a studio that is currently really excited by ornament, optical illusions, and lazy forms. Together with her partner James Macgillivray, they have experimented on these topics through school research, in temporary installations, and on permanent buildings. Lee is a U.S. registered architect who lives in Toronto.

Tucker Marder is an artist, filmmaker and plantsman. He has collaborated with institutions such as The National Aviary, The Nature Conservancy and Phipps Conservatory. Tucker is a recipient of the Frank Ratchye Grant for Art at the Frontier and in 2016 was named a Redford Center Grant Honoree. Tucker’s performance “STAMPEDE!”, comprised of over 200 live Crested Runner Ducks and large motorized abstract puppets premiered as part of the 2015 Parrish Road Show. Tucker is the founder of the Folly Tree Arboretum, a collection of over 175 rare and unusual trees intent on showcasing nature’s sense of humor. Tucker received his MFA from Carnegie Mellon University.

Thom Moran is an American architect, designer, and educator. He joined the University of Michigan’s Taubman College as the 2009-2010 Muschenheim Fellow where he is currently an assistant professor. Humor and lightheartedness are at the center of his practice, which involves solo projects and several ongoing collaborations that each explore particular issues. THING THING is a Detroit-based design collaborative that makes things with plastic, using novel fabrication methods to hijack post-consumer material ecologies. With Meredith Miller he works on an architectural scale, exploring media and environment as sources for multiple, simultaneous effects. Thom and Michael Savona collect designs that engage the relationship between people, interiors, and objects at Frontieriors.

Mike Perry is an artist, animator, creative director, brand consultant, poet, and designer. His work encompasses paintings, drawings, sculptures, art installations, books, murals, all of which are made to conjure that feeling of soul-soaring you have when you stare into distant galaxies on a dark night, when you go on long journeys into the imagination, when you laugh and can’t stop laughing. Key to Mike’s working method is the recognition that art and objects, go through many iterations—discoveries, coverings, uncoverings—until they’re finished; people do the same until they are fully revealed. He likes to cultivate collectives of celebration, exhibition, and revelation.

Support

Storefront’s programming is made possible through general support from Arup; DS+R; F.J. Sciame Construction Co., Inc.; Gaggenau; Knippers Helbig; KPF; MADWORKSHOP; ODA; Rockwell Group; Roger Ferris + Partners; Tishman Speyer; the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; The Greenwich Collection Ltd.; the Lily Auchincloss Foundation; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; The Peter T. Joseph Foundation; and by Storefront’s Board of Directors, members, and individual donors.

We begin the year in a time of heightened crisis, a moment of contradiction during which our belief systems about the world are being challenged daily. Today, more than ever before, there is a need to explore the paradoxical, to be present while being invisible, and to escape while infiltrating.

“Letters from Prison,” Antonio Gramsci’s seminal work, presented to the world an understanding of the conflicted and complex functions of cultural hegemony, and was a critical tool for freedom that was created in a moment of confinement.

Cabaret Series: Old Methods for New Wars will present several magical performances as metaphorical “letters from prison.” The performances demonstrate the power of magic as a tool to understand the nature of transformation, freedom, and ultimately, hope.

This special evening, conceived of by A.BANDIT, will bring together dialogue and magic, with performances from some of the most noteworthy magicians in the field.

About the Cabaret Series:

Each iteration of Storefront’s Cabaret Series develops modes of expression that engage with the social, political, and physical space of Storefront in a playful and humorous manner. The events aim to produce new modes of communication between speakers, performers, and spectators through provocation, seduction, and immediacy.

About A.Bandit:

A.Bandit is an experimental performance art group started by conceptual artist Glenn Kaino and conceptual magician Derek DelGaudio. Formed as an alliance with the intention of creating a new performative medium between the worlds of art and magic, A.Bandit has performed their spectacular psycho-spatial interventions at such venues as The Kitchen, NYC; The Geffen Playhouse, Los Angeles; Pershing Square Signature Center, NYC; Soho House, Los Angeles; Art LA Contemporary in Santa Monica; and LAXART Annex in Hollywood, where they have taken residence for six months opening up what they called a conceptual magic shop called ‘The Space Between.” Their first artist monogram will come out this year from Prestel/Delmonico, and their most recent production “In & Of Itself” just finished a 16-week sold out run at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles and is coming to New York in Spring 2017.

Storefront’s programming is made possible through general support from Arup; DS+R; F.J. Sciame Construction Co., Inc.; Gaggenau; Knippers Helbig; KPF; MADWORKSHOP; ODA; Rockwell Group; Roger Ferris + Partners; the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; The Greenwich Collection Ltd.; the Lily Auchincloss Foundation; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; The Peter T. Joseph Foundation; and by Storefront’s Board of Directors, members, and individual donors.